


picking up the pieces

by ScatteredWords



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Human Carmilla Karnstein, Hurt/Comfort, Season 3 Spoilers, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 18:58:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8296603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScatteredWords/pseuds/ScatteredWords
Summary: "Are you quite finished?" The stars didn't answer. "You've been making and unmaking me for so long. Do I ever get a say?" Happy endings aren't always as easy as we'd like. Carmilla learns that firsthand.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Probably the only thing I'll ever write with human!Carmilla. I don't particularly like the idea, but there's a story worth telling in it: the story of a girl who never had a choice and who she decides to be. The plot bunnies wouldn't leave me alone at work yesterday, so here this is.

Laura would never understand why she’d woken up that night. Normally, the faint whisper of sheets shifting wouldn’t have even registered in a dream, let alone roused her completely. She’d never understand why, but she’d always be glad it did.

She blinked and the darkness clarified into a hazy figure next to her, sitting up and clutching its jackknifed knees. “Carm…?”

The figure turned its head and looked down at her. “Hey, cupcake. Go back to sleep.”

It was such a familiar exchange that her brain immediately slotted it into place. Of course. Carmilla had gotten back from hunting or brooding or whatever activities occupied her nights while Laura slept and was now crawling into bed to be there when she woke. Like the rest of the weird in Laura’s world, this routine had somehow become normal. Unlike the rest, she welcomed it with open arms. She rolled over, snuggling up to her pillow- and stopped.

Except that wasn’t what had happened.

Except Carmilla had eaten dinner with her in the only non-immolated dining hall on campus, come back to the dorm with her, said goodnight and gone to bed with her.

Except Carmilla was human.

Laura rolled back over, determined to do her duty as resident Humanity Training Officer. “Um. You should probably go back to sleep, too, or you’re gonna be dead tired in the morning.”

A low, velvety chuckle from the other half of the bed. “You’ve been complaining about my sleep schedule since we met. I am aware of the concept.”

“Then why-” The sleep clouds lifted a little more, her eyes adjusted better to the glow of the plastic stars on the ceiling, and she got a better look at Carmilla’s face. Red, puffy, especially around the eyes and nose. There was a darker place on her lip the size of her front teeth. Laura sat up.

“Carmilla,” she began slowly, “are…are you okay?”

Sheets rustled again, as if in someone’s hand. “I’ll be fine,” Carmilla replied at last. She turned to Laura with a smile that even the most generous person would call strained. “Go on back to sleep. I’ll join you shortly.”

“Hey.” Laura groped around for her hand, found it, and squeezed it. “It’s okay. What’s wrong? You can tell me.”

Carmilla’s fingers laced with Laura’s, gripping her hard. As if she feared letting go. “It’s…dark.”

Laura blinked. “I mean, it’s night.”

“Yes. It’s night and it’s actually, really dark.”

Suddenly, Laura’s sleep-fogged mind caught up. “Oh. Oh, Carm.”

As if something small had quietly broken, Carmilla’s shoulders sagged. She let out a ragged breath, still clutching Laura’s hand like a lifeline.

“ ‘I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.’ But they’re gone. I can’t…they’re the faintest pinpricks now. This is wrong; it’s not supposed to be this dark. I’m not supposed to be sleeping, but I have to be. It’s wrong. It’s so, so wrong…” She trailed off, and Laura realized she was shaking. 

With a sigh, Laura gathered Carmilla into her arms. The hand that had grasped hers now clutched at her baggy TARDIS t-shirt just as desperately. Carmilla buried her head in Laura’s shoulder, and something hot and wet began soaking the fabric.

“I can’t be human.” The words were barely more than a whisper, so tiny and lost that Laura’s heart ached. “I don’t know how. I don’t even know how to start.” And then, like a prayer, “Take it back. Please.”

They stayed like that for a long time, Laura unable to shake the feeling that she was holding Carmilla together. It could have been minutes, hours- she didn’t care. Even if it took days of sitting right here, unmoving, she would not let her fall apart. She ran her fingers gently through dark, tangled curls and pressed kiss after kiss to Carmilla’s forehead.

“You don’t have to,” she said quietly. “All you have to be is you, whatever that means. It doesn't have to be neat or even make sense. Just be you.”  
\-----------------------------

Bruises had become the new black.

(LaFontaine made that joke exactly once before finding out that the business end of angry Carmilla: human edition was only slightly less painful. As an even better deterrent, their still-buggy laser eye had to be recalibrated twice after the force of the punch.)

Burke Hall room 131 might as well have been a minefield for all the hidden dangers it seemed to hold. Not one morning went by that Carmilla didn’t threaten archaic violence against her desk, Laura’s desk, the floor lamp, or the edge of the impressively ugly purple throw rug. Laura, having decided the best action was no reaction, ignored these incidents with a determination that confused visitors. And tried to pretend the rainbow on her girlfriend’s body didn’t twist her heart a little whenever she noticed it.

Things continued that way until the day Carmilla came home, threw her bag at the wall, stormed into the bathroom, and slammed the door. After mentally counting down from 100, Laura padded across the carpet and knocked.

No response.

“Carmilla?”

Still nothing.

“Carm, eventually I’m going to have to pee.”

The door remained as silent and impassive as ever. But Laura Hollis never did know when to quit.

“And I love you and you love me, but I didn’t think you were that ready to embrace my bodily functions, so-”

“There’s no point telling you to go away, is there?” The words were muffled but unmistakable. Laura: one. Sulky former vampire girlfriend: zero.

“Nope,” Laura chirped. “So you might as well tell me what the gloom du jour is.”

The door cracked open and a single brown eye peeked out. “Like you can’t guess.”

“Considering you came in and holed up in there without so much as a ‘hi,’ no, I can’t.”

Carmilla sighed. The door swung open, and Laura gasped without even realizing it.

If cat-form Carmilla had appeared from the recent past and dragged in her current self, the result wouldn’t be very different from what currently stood in the bathroom doorway. Mud streaked her face and chest, and a long grass stain ran down the front of her gauzy gray top. Her legs were a mess: bruises, yes, but also miscellaneous scrapes and one nasty-looking gash.

“I tripped.”

Laura tried to find her voice. “You…tripped?” she managed weakly.

“Over a rock on the quad.”

Silence, broken only by Laura’s incoherent spluttering.

“More like a boulder, really, but that’s beside the point.” Carmilla shoved her hair back and breathed out sharply through her nose. “And…some Zetas saw me and laughed.”

Anger. Anger was good. Anger was something Laura could fix on. Her tongue caught up with her thoughts again. “Who do I have to kill?”

“That’s my line, sweetheart,” Carmilla said with a humorless chuckle. “Or at least, it should be.”

Laura growled and stalked off to find the first-aid kit. To her surprise, Carmilla submitted to her aggressive doctoring with a minimum of fuss.

As she wound up the roll of gauze and put it away, a thought flickered to life. “Carm,” she asked, feeling slightly sick, “did you ask to be mortal again? After I…you know.”

Brown eyes bored into hers. “No.”  
\--------------------

When Laura caught her licking blood off her fingers while redressing her leg, she tried to stop her.

“You’re going to make yourself sick.”

“I can taste the ghost of it. It’s still good, almost.”

Laura let her have this, and said nothing.  
\---------------------

A heart monitor beeped, the only sound in the too-sterile white room. Why Silas Student Health was set up so much like an actual hospital, Laura didn’t want to know.

“Should have known you’d end up here before six months were out. Stupid ex-vampire,” she muttered, smiling weakly at the prone form on the bed. Fast asleep, dark hair fanned out on the white pillow like a shadow, Carmilla would put any fairytale princess to shame. Throwing caution to the winds, Laura leaned down and gently kissed her.

As expected, her eyes fluttered open. “How long have you wanted to do that?”

Laura’s smile grew stronger, more real. “Since I was eight.”

“Happy to help.” Carmilla raised her head and glanced at the white walls, white sheets, white clock ticking steadily across from the metal bed. “Um. Where are we?”

“Student Health,” Laura replied. She traced the blue line of a vein in Carmilla’s wrist. “You collapsed in the gym.”

A shadow crossed Carmilla’s face. “Obnoxious meddling coeds.”

“They said you’d been there for hours.”

“It was none of their business.”

“Carmilla.” Laura grabbed her shoulders and stared into her eyes. “They said you’ve been doing this every day for at least a week. They all remembered you were there when they came in and there when they left.”

Carmilla shrugged. “So I’m dedicated,” she said quietly. “It’s none of their business.”

“It’s an addiction.” The words came out louder than Laura had intended. A med student paused in the hall outside, only to stumble over his feet running away when Carmilla glared daggers at him under Laura’s arm.

She took a deep breath. “It’s an addiction,” she repeated more softly. “This isn’t healthy. It sounds like you’re spending all your spare time there, and if you’re working yourself until you pass out, you’re going to get seriously hurt.”

Carmilla didn’t meet her eyes. Instead, she stared at the flimsy white blanket as if her eyes could burn a hole in it. When she finally spoke, Laura could barely make out the words.

“I’m so tired of feeling wrong.”

Laura had gone up against gods before, and in that moment she dearly wished she could do it again. But the heavens didn’t open and the clock didn’t stop.  
\------------------------------

It was barely noticeable at first. After all, it’s easy to miss the absence of something you aren’t used to. So when Carmilla’s clumsiness began to vanish, Laura didn’t realize for an embarrassingly long time.

At first it’s in idle moments. When Laura looks at her girlfriend and realized she was still capable of breathtaking grace- for a human. But even within human bounds, it was enough, and so close that it seemed achingly familiar. So close that almost nothing had changed.

Then the inevitable thump of flesh hitting particleboard, the string of language fit to make a sailor blush, and the new normal jarringly snapped back into place. Perhaps it was the first day without that now-common thump that she finally caught on. In the future, that’s always how she’d tell the story, so it might as well be true. She glanced at Carmilla, who for her part was sprawled on her bed deep in some French novel as usual.

“Carm?”

“Mm?”

“Are you…you’ve…I mean…”

Carmilla slid a bookmark into the leather-bound tome and glanced at Laura. “Spit it out, cutie.”

“You’re…not tripping over things anymore.”

She braced herself for the expected frosty silence, the cold shoulder that inevitably resulted when anyone drew attention to Carmilla’s human shortcomings.

Instead, she got- laughter?

There was definitely no mistaking the quiet snickering from the other side of the room. Carmilla swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up. “Took you long enough. I owe Terminator 5 euros; guess that’s what I get for having faith in your observational skills.”

“But how-” Laura’s brow furrowed. “Wait. You guys were betting on me?”

“Yep.” As Carmilla grabbed her bag and began rooting through a wallet that was hopefully her own, Laura’s indignation and curiosity went to war. Curiosity managed to put indignation in a temporary headlock.

“How, though?” she managed.

Carmilla stood and walked to the door, and Laura wondered how she could have missed the fluidity in her movement. Not quite vampiric, no, but still so familiar. So right.  
She paused and turned back to Laura, half-smiling. “I took your advice, cupcake. I stopped trying to be something I’m not.”

“What?”

“Human.”  
\-------------------

“Are you quite finished?”

The stars didn’t answer, but continue wheeling above the darkened campus in their silent dance. Carmilla addressed them anyway.  
“You’ve been making and unmaking me for so long. Do I ever get a say?”

Her breath came in smoky puffs. Summer was long over, fading fast into winter, and the weight of the leather jacket on her shoulders was still unfamiliar. On a night like this, she should have been wearing the light, flowing, sleeveless shirts she loved so the chill air could slip across her skin like silk. That would never happen again, and she’d already spent half the autumn mourning for it.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be one thing or the other. A vampire who loved humans. A human who only knows how to be a vampire. Maybe I’ve been something in between all along.”  
“You never gave me a choice. Now I choose to be me.”

It could have been her imagination, but a few stars seemed to glitter just a bit brighter.  
\----------------------

Alex Archibald, Jr. never planned for his first day of college to go this way. Fawning girls had been expected. Eager, courting fraternities, ditto. Professors dazed by his intellectual prowess and sports teams falling over themselves to recruit him. All this his father, Alex Archibald, Sr. had promised as former Zeta Omega Mu president and very generous donor to the Future of Silas fund.

Being cornered on the quad by a giant scorpion, not so much.

He tried to back up still further and felt the rough brick wall of a building dig into his back. There was absolutely no escape.

“Um. Nice…buggy? Good scorpion. You don’t want to hurt me.”

The gnashing mandibles a foot from his face seemed to counter that, yes, the nice buggy did very much want to hurt him.

“I should have gone to the Sorbonne,” he whimpered. With one final, silent prayer, he screwed his eyes shut and waited for the end.

It never came. Instead, a roaring noise grew louder in his ears and the stench of the scorpion seemed to clear somewhat. He opened his eyes. A scuffed black motorcycle now stood between him and the monster, its rider an unidentifiable figure in dark leather. He heard something over the din of the idling engine.

“What?”

“Get on!” came the answering shout.

He didn’t need telling twice. The instant after he’d scrambled onto the back of the bike, it shot off like a bullet from a gun. The driver twisted in her- he guessed, now that his arms were firmly cemented around her waist, that she was a her – seat and shouted something over the wind and the engine, a phrase in some staccato language he’d never heard before. Then, “Head down!”

Alex ducked without thinking about it. Behind them, the scorpion exploded. Clouds of emerald-green smoke billowed around them, obscuring the campus for a moment. Then came the rain of scorpion parts. A leg bounced off his back and he tried unsuccessfully not to gibber. At last, the motorcycle slowed to a halt.

“W-what the hell was that?” he yelled when his stomach finally returned from its extended trip to his kneecaps.

The rider carefully disengaged his hands from her waist and slid off the bike. “There are more things in heaven and earth,” she said, stripping off her leather gloves and flexing her hands, “than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And I’ve been a philosophy major four times, so I would know.”

He blinked at her. “What? What are you, some kind of witch?”

His mysterious rescuer didn’t answer. Instead, she took off her helmet and shook out her long, dark hair. Smirking like the cat in the cream, she raised her hand to her lips and delicately lapped at a shallow cut on her palm.

“I’m the more things.”


End file.
